Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai has a message for the 1.28 million registered in Bexar County, and those he hopes will register before Monday’s deadline: please vote.
The fact that a record number of eligible voters have registered doesn’t mean a thing if they don’t get out and vote, he said during a Friday morning press conference. “I want people to recognize that their power is through their voice, which is through their vote.”
Sakai also emphasized his “full faith” in the county’s Elections Department and Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen, who is overseeing her last election before retiring. Sakai said the county is in the process of hiring a national search firm to replace Callanen, who has served since 2005.
“I have no doubt that the elections administration office has voter integrity, that she protects the sanctity and the confidentiality” of the election. Early voting begins on Oct. 21 and runs through Nov. 1. He urged voters to take advantage of early voting sites and vote early to beat long lines on Election Day, Nov. 5.
He said the elections office is working with the county’s Office of Emergency Management on cybersecurity measures, and with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office on physical security.
Earlier this week, Callanen urged voters to go to the county’s election website to check that their registration is current, download an individual sample ballot and check out the map of 51 early polling sites.
She said her office is preparing for about 900,000 people to actually get out to vote, or about 70% of registered voters. In the last presidential election in 2020, about 63.5% of the 1.19 million eligible voters cast a ballot, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.
Voter registration lawsuit
Sakai said it is too early to judge the effectiveness of the county’s $393,000 voter registration contract with Civic Government Solutions (CGS), which mailed out 210,000 prefilled applications and pre-paid return envelopes to eligible voters. Sakai said the campaign targeted, among other groups, those who have recently moved to San Antonio and Bexar County.
The paid registration campaign put Bexar County into Attorney General Ken Paxton’s crosshairs. Paxton sued Bexar and other Texas counties for hiring CGS, which maintains a proprietary database of eligible but unregistered voters.
Sakai emphasized, as he has previously, that he believes the county is on firm legal footing in the lawsuit, having done its due diligence on the legal questions at issue. While the AGs office missed the chance to stop the 210,000 voter registration letters from going out, the lawsuit continues.
Despite the record number of registered voters in Bexar County this election season, it’s unclear if that means the percentage of eligible voters who are registered has increased. The county does not track that percentage — no governmental entity does.
That’s in part because it’s difficult to do with precision. Unlike county voter rolls, which change every single day as new voters are registered and ineligible ones are removed, the county’s current population is only ever an estimate, extrapolated from U.S. Census Bureau data, which can be years old.
CGS, which does its own number crunching, estimates that nearly one-third of eligible voters are unregistered. CEO Jeremy Smith told County Commissioners that CGS identified about 250,000 eligible but unregistered voters in the county, which he estimated to be about three-quarters of all unregistered voters.
In the coming years, CGS will also contact another 15,000 to 20,000 newly identified residents who’ve moved to the area, according to its contract with Bexar County.
Sakai said CGS will report the success of its voter registration efforts to commissioners after the election before deciding whether it will use CGS for future election year efforts. “We want the data,” he said.
